Cultural Competence in Nursing Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Cultural Competence in Nursing - Essay Example Such perceptions are very common in the United States because a bigger percent of the citizens are Christians who believe in God or a higher power. This concept applies to the chronically ill and the families who at most times may strongly belief that their chronic illness could e a sort of test and that through God’s intervention the illness will eventually be treatable. This means that this chronically ill patient focuses on inner strength and health care givers should fully apply their cultural competence by supporting the patient and its family’s cultural beliefs. More so, nurses and health care givers can obtain focused information about client’s presenting illness and his perception of causes of illness and beliefs about cultural treatment modalities (Jeffreys, 2010). This concept usually applies to patients or families of the chronically ill patients who believe in non-biomedical healing tradition. These individuals strongly believe that traditional medici ne could be more effective to biomedical medication. A competent health giver or nurse should understand this cultural concept by understanding the chronically ill patient or his family’s wish. Ideally, culturally competence approach would put up ways to communicate with chronically ill patients about their perception of their conditions, concerns and fears about a particular medication. Hence, physicians and caregivers could play a crucial timely role in addressing social cultural barriers to care by following culturally competent approaches to decision support (Jeffreys, 2010). Cultural competence can also assist patients to manage their own illnesses by providing educational information... This essay stresses that effective communication and interaction between health care givers and their chronically ill patients is essential because it delivers high-quality care. Statistics from the National Adult Literacy Survey claims that approximately ninety million U.S. adults have trouble in reading written text. More statistics claim that patients with chronic illness and limited health literacy have less knowledge of managing diseases, compared to those with higher literacy level. Such situations are commonly evident in the current society. For instance, a patient suffering from chronic illness like diabetes may tend to think that since diabetes is hereditary, there is no means of controlling it since other family members suffered from the disease and eventually died and so is his fate. In this respect, proper education through effective communication from the caregivers will be of crucial help to inform the chronically patient that insulin injection will greatly assist in co ntrolling diabetes. This paper makes a conclusion that chronic illnesses are terminal illnesses that needs accurate acceptance by the patients and their families. This means that the health care givers have a hard task of building a strong relationship with the patients in order to understand their likes and innermost views and likes. The outcome from the chronically ill patients lays the platform for the caregivers to deliver the best and efficient services as well as help in eradicating health disparities starting from individual levels.